James Madison spent the months before the Constitutional Convention studying every confederacy in ancient and modern history, writing a memorandum cataloguing the failures of the Articles of Confederation, and drafting a plan for a new national government. He arrived in Philadelphia knowing more about the subject than anyone else in the room. The archive holds what he read, what he wrote, and what he said.
In April 1787, a month before the Convention opened, Madison wrote a memorandum cataloguing eleven specific failures of the Articles of Confederation. He called it "Vices of the Political System of the United States." It was not published — it was his private analysis, prepared to clarify his own thinking before he arrived in Philadelphia. The original manuscript is at the Library of Congress. The full text is at Founders Online.
1. Failure of the States to comply with the Constitutional Requisitions.
2. Encroachments by the States on the federal authority.
3. Violations of the law of nations and of treaties.
4. Trespasses of the States on the rights of each other.
5. Want of concert in matters where common interest requires it.
6. Want of Guaranty to the States of their Constitutions and laws against internal violence.
7. Want of sanction to the laws, and of coercion in the Government of the Confederacy.
8. Want of ratification by the people of the articles of Confederation.
Madison's list ran to eleven items. The memorandum fed directly into the Virginia Plan — the set of resolutions submitted to the Convention on May 29, 1787, by Governor Edmund Randolph, drawn from Madison's letters to Randolph, Washington, and Jefferson in the weeks before the Convention. The Library of Congress holds the original "Vices" manuscript and Madison's Convention notes.
The Constitutional Convention met in closed session from May 25 to September 17, 1787. No official transcript was kept of the debates. Madison sat at the front of the room, facing the delegates, and took notes on nearly every speech delivered over four months. He wrote longhand — then stayed up nights transcribing and expanding his notes before memory faded. The result is the primary record of what the framers argued about and why they chose what they chose.
Madison did not publish the notes during his lifetime. He revised them periodically over four decades and left instructions that they be published after his death. They were published in 1840, four years after he died. The original manuscripts are at the Library of Congress. The full text is at Yale Avalon.
Madison wrote Federalist No. 10 on November 22, 1787 — the argument that a large republic with many factions would be more stable than a small one, because no single faction could dominate. It became the most-cited essay in American constitutional history. Federalist No. 51, published February 6, 1788, argued for the separation of powers and checks and balances as mechanisms for controlling government by its own internal structure. Both are at Yale Avalon.
Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
On October 24, 1787, Madison wrote Jefferson in Paris explaining why he thought a bill of rights unnecessary. The letter is at Founders Online. His argument echoed Wilson's State House Yard Speech — that the federal government held only enumerated powers, so a list of retained rights was redundant and potentially dangerous.
My own opinion has always been in favor of a bill of rights; provided it be so framed as not to imply powers not meant to be included in the enumeration. At the same time I have never thought the omission a material defect, nor been anxious to supply it even by subsequent amendment, for any other reason than that it is anxiously desired by others.
Jefferson's reply from Paris pushed back — Jefferson argued a bill of rights was essential. Madison changed his position. On June 8, 1789, Madison stood in the House of Representatives and introduced the amendments that became the Bill of Rights. His speech is in the Annals of Congress at the Library of Congress.
Both documents are in the archive. Both are Madison's words. The Bill of Rights was ratified December 15, 1791 — the ten amendments Madison had argued were unnecessary and then introduced to Congress.
In retirement at Montpelier after his presidency, Madison continued to write. He kept notes on the Convention, corresponded with historians, and addressed political controversies that threatened to unravel what the Convention had built. Two documents from this period are at Founders Online.
The Detached Memoranda — written around 1820 — is a private document in which Madison revisited several constitutional questions. He argued that congressional chaplains violated the separation of church and state, that religious proclamations by the executive were constitutionally doubtful, and that the Constitution's religion clauses required stricter separation than he had practiced as president. The document was not published until 1946. It is at Founders Online.
In December 1834 — two years before his death — Madison wrote "Notes on Nullification," directly addressing South Carolina's claim that a single state could arrest the execution of a federal law. He rejected the doctrine, distinguishing what he had argued in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 from what nullification advocates were now claiming those resolutions authorized.
That the doctrine of nullification may be clearly understood, it must be taken as laid down in the Report of a Committee of the House of Representatives of South Carolina in 1828. In that document it is asserted, that a single State has a constitutional right to arrest the execution of a law of the United States within its limits, that the arrest is to be presumed right and valid and is to remain in force unless three fourths of the States in a Convention, shall otherwise decide.
James Madison died on June 28, 1836 at Montpelier, Virginia. He was 85 years old — the last surviving delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He had outlived every other man who signed the document. When asked about his health in his final years he said he had simply "outlived himself."
He left a note to be read after his death. It is at the Library of Congress. It reads: "As this advice, if it ever see the light will not do it till I am no more, it may be considered as issuing from the tomb, where truth alone can be respected, and the happiness of man alone consulted. It will be entitled therefore to whatever weight cannot be denied to good intentions, and to the experience of one who has served his country in various stations through a period of forty years, who espoused in his youth and adhered through his life to the cause of its liberty, and who has borne a part in most of the transactions which will constitute epochs of its destiny."